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ENTRIES TAGGED "open source"

The short answer is: Services

That is a question I get asked all the time. And quite rightly so. After all, without the license model and the source code being out in the open, free for everybody to download and do with it whatever they want – where is the actual product? And how do you make money with it?

LibriVox is a volunteer effort with a big goal: record audiobook editions for every title in the public domain. In this Q&A, LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire discusses the project's beginnings, the organic development of the LibriVox community, and the distinctions (or lack thereof) between "professional" and "amateur" efforts.

Publishers with content in DocBook XML format can now easily create EPUB files using the open source DocBook XSL package (which already supports output to HTML and to XSL-FO — a format that can be turned into PDF — along with several other formats). Here at O'Reilly we've long used DocBook as the format for Safari Books Online, and…

Inside Higher Ed notes the slowly growing open source textbook movement: Colleges and individual faculty members continue to experiment with putting course information and material online, and "open textbooks" typically are licensed to allow users to download, share and alter the content as they see fit, so long as their purposes aren't commercial and they credit the author for…

I've seen several softball pieces (such as this one) praising Penguin's decision to release, on Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, some classics of English literature, starting with Jane Austen, with certain extras, in multiple ebook formats. Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example, "will come with recipes from the era, copies of the book's first reviews, and a primer on social…

Microsoft's failed bid to make its "Open XML" format an ISO standard was certainly newsworthy, though it was slightly surprising to see it covered in detail in the Wall Street Journal, and to hear about it this evening on MarketPlace. Among the most amusing responses to Microsoft's failed efforts (which include some questionable attempts at a fast-track and alleged vote…